” You’re going out with friends mid-week, and you don’t want the boss/significant other/parole officer to find out. But it’s a birthday celebration, and Facebook’s auto-tagging the pictures your buddies upload like a dirty snitch. The first piece of advice: never “friend” your parole officer. The second? Maybe grab a pair of these “privacy” glasses from software security firm AVG. You, of course, can see my visage above, but AVG claims the technology in the specs means facial recognition software (like that of Facebook) will not.

” Fresno police are at the forefront of a new technology designed to figure out how much danger officers may be getting into as they respond to 911 calls. But the product is drawing comparisons to Big Brother because of the massive amount of personal information it collects.

At least two cops might be alive today if they had access to the software we got to see. But once it’s put to use by police, you have to watch what you say or risk being labeled a threat.

Before the assassination of two New York police officers in December, an obvious warning was there for anyone to read. But the message in the killer’s public Instagram post never reached officers Liu and Ramos. Two months later, every call to Fresno police dispatchers could give similar warnings the chance to reach officers through new software known as Beware.

” To the extent that there is information that is in the public domain, regardless of where the input was derived, it could potentially be surfaced through a Beware query,” said Allen Carr, vice president of Intrado, the company producing and marketing Beware to first responders of all types.

Intrado buys billions of pieces of commercially available personal information — the same stuff credit agencies have. It adds arrest records from police databases and within seconds, gives a quick look at who lives at any address and a profile for every person associated with the address.”

” Towing companies are a necessary evil when it comes to parking enforcement and property repossession. But in the Google Earth we now inhabit, tow trucks do more than just yank cars out of loading zones. They use license-plate readers (LPRs) to assemble a detailed profile of where your car will be and when. That’s an unnecessary evil.

Plate readers have long been a tool of law enforcement, and police officers swear by them for tracking stolen cars and apprehending dangerous criminals. But private companies, such as repo crews, also photograph millions of plates a day, with scanners mounted on tow trucks and even on purpose-built camera cars whose sole mission is to drive around and collect plate scans. Each scan is GPS-tagged and stamped with the date and time, feeding a massive data trove to any law-enforcement agency—or government-approved private industry—willing to pay for it.

You’ve probably been tagged at the office, at a mall, or even in your own driveway. And the companies that sell specialized monitoring software that assembles all these sightings into a reliable profile stand to profit hugely. Brian Hauss, a legal fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says: “The whole point is so you can figure out somebody’s long-term location. Unless there are limits on how those transactions can be processed, I think it’s just a matter of time until there are significant privacy violations, if they haven’t already occurred.”

(How Is This Even Legal? License-plate-reader companies don’t have access to DMV registrations, so while they can track your car, they don’t know it’s yours. That information is guarded by the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994, which keeps your name, address, and driving history from public view. Mostly. There are plenty of exceptions, including for insurance companies and private investigators. LPR companies say only two groups can use its software to find the person behind the plate: law-enforcement agencies and repossession companies. In addition, the encrypted databases keep a log of each plate search and allow the ability to restrict access.)

The companies that push plate readers enjoy unregulated autonomy in most states. Vigilant Solutions of California and its partner, Texas-based Digital Recognition Network, boast at least 2 billion license-plate scans since starting the country’s largest private license-plate database, the National Vehicle Location Service, in 2009.

In total, there are at least 3 billion license-plate photos in private databases. Since many are duplicates and never deleted, analytics can paint a vivid picture of any motorist. Predicting where and when someone will drive is relatively easy; software can sort how many times a car is spotted in a certain area and, when fed enough data, can generate a person’s driving history over time.”

” The NSA has issued a Public Announcement today saying that everyone who owns a laptop, cell phone, smart TV, and any other modern social device with video recording, is advised to clean their camera lens regularly.

An unnamed member of the NSA has released the statement through their Twitter account adding that “It’s really not good for morale when you see a chick in her bedroom through the laptop, and the camera lens blurs the image because of a smudge or something, especially when she’s pretty hot.” The NSA Twitter account later stated that “if you are under a 5 out of 10 on the hotness scale then you can disregard the advisory.”

This is not the first very open statement the NSA has made in recent months when they released a tweet saying, “You know what? Everyone knows we’re watching, so we might as well save billions on secrecy and be blatant about it. I mean, the cat’s out of the bag and we, as a tax-powered institution, should just admit it.”

There have also been hundreds of complaints recently from all collective genders about receiving random and untraceable phone texts while at home, asking the recipients things like, “Turn around a few times” and “It’s a little warm for that sweater, don’t you think?”

When asked about the recent unprofessional attitude they officially state that “it’s 2015, so get with the times, this is the new standard of government professionalism.”

” The leading suppler of automated license plate reader technology in the US (ALPR, also known as ANPR in Europe) is expanding its offerings to law enforcement. Vehicle owners have already had their movements tracked by the company Vigilant Solutions, which boasts 2 billion entries in its nationwide database, with 70 million additional license plate photographs being added each month. Now passengers can also be tracked if they hitch a ride with a friend and are photographed by a camera aimed at the front of the car. The Livermore, California-based firm recently announced expanded integration of facial recognition technology into its offerings.”

” ” The new Vigilant Mobile Companion app expands the benefits of license plate recognition and facial recognition technologies to all areas of the agency,” a Vigilant Solutions press release claimed. “Using many of the new analytic tools that Vigilant has released in its Learn product over the last couple of years, the app makes these tools even more easy to use and accessible on a mobile device. The app also features Vigilant’s FaceSearch facial recognition which analyzes over 350 different vectors of the human face.”

” As of today, Bill HR4681 has passed the house and senate, and is currently undergoing arbitration before being sent to the President for his signature in to law. The law says that the intelligence community can collect, retain, and disseminate all electronic communications including voice calls [without any constitutional restrictions] on all US citizens and everyone else in the world. And they have 5 years before they are supposed to destroy the records. However, they can keep them indefinitely if they fall into several categories of interest.

It is all out in the open now. Your 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendment protections are gone. This act gives new meaning to ‘land of the free, home of the brave.’ The intelligence community isn’t doing anything in secret any more. Americans are now living in an environment much like the days of the old Stalinist Soviet Union, where the presumption was that all conversations were monitored and one takes measures to have a ‘private’ conversations.

So turn up your radio or turn the water on in the sink and watch what you say on the phone or Facebook, even casual remarks on twitter may come back to haunt you in the future. Don’t believe me, I have pasted the relevant parts of the bill below this story. Still don’t believe it? Just go to www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4681/text and read it from the horse’s mouth.

” A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.

The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time.

Relatively little is known about precisely how stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although more and more documents have surfaced showing how they’ve been purchased and used in limited instances. Last year, Ars reported on leaked documents showing the existence of a body-worn stingray. In 2010, security researcher Kristin Paget famously demonstrated a homemade device built for just $1,500.

Worse still, local cops have lied to courts (at the direction of the United States Marshals Service) about the use of such technology. Not only can stingrays be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. While they do target specific phones, they also sweep up cell data of innocents nearby who have no idea that such data collection is taking place. “

” Fifty years ago, FBI operatives sent Martin Luther King, Jr. was has come to be known as the “suicide letter,” an anonymous note suggesting the civil rights leader should off himself before his private sex life was made public. The information about King’s extramarital assignations was gathered with the approval not just of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover but Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson.

” There is but one way out for you,” reads the note, which appeared in unredacted form for the first time just last week. “You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Thus is revealed one of the most despicable acts of domestic surveillance in memory. These days, we worry less about the government outing our sex lives than in it tracking every move we move online. It turns out that President Obama, who said he would roll back the unconstitutional powers exercised by his predecessor, had a secret “kill list” over which he was sole authority. Jesus, we’ve just learned that small planes are using so-called dirtboxes to pick up cell phone traffic. One of the architects of Obamacare publicly states that Americans are stupid and that the president’s healthcare reform was vague and confusing on purpose. The former director of national intelligence, along with the former head and current heads of the CIA, have lied to Congress.”

The change by AT&T essentially removes a hidden string of letters and numbers that are passed along to websites that a consumer visits. It can be used to track subscribers across the Internet, a lucrative data-mining opportunity for advertisers that could still reveal users’ identities based on their browsing habits.

Verizon Wireless, the country’s largest mobile firm, said Friday it still uses this type of tracking, known as “super cookies.” Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis said business and government customers don’t have the code inserted. There has been no evidence that Sprint and T-Mobile have used such codes.

” As with any program, we’re constantly evaluating, and this is no different,” Lewis said, adding that consumers can ask that their codes not be used for advertising tracking. But that still passes along the codes to websites, even if subscribers say they don’t want their data being used for marketing purposes.

The tracking codes are part of the latest plan by the cellular industry to keep tabs on users and their devices. While the codes don’t explicitly contain personal information, they’re unique and nonetheless sent to websites alongside personal details that a user may submit voluntarily — like a name or a phone number.

That means enough data can transform a large chunk of random digits into a digital fingerprint that’s as identifying as a Social Security number. AT&T said Friday its tracker was part of a testing project that’s been phased off of its network.

” This is more like a license plate for your brain,” said Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that opposed the practice. “Everything you wonder about, and read, and ask the Internet about gets this header attached to it. And there are ad agencies out there that try to associate that browsing history with anything that identifies you.”

” Almost every time we stay at a hotel, especially a ‘brand-name’ hotel, we leave our trust in the hands of those that clean our rooms when we’re out.

It’s just normal for us to believe that these people have respect for our privacy. However, someone recently tested this theory out in a ‘brand-named’ hotel, and what he caught on camera was actually quite eye opening.

Watch as this cleaner browses through this guy’s luggage, checks out his PS3 games, spends a good few minutes trying to log into his tablet and laptop then finally decides to do a bit of (pretty casual) cleaning.”

” It shouldn’t be so easy to peer into a stranger’s bedroom, much less hundreds of strangers’ bedrooms. But a website has collected the streaming footage from over 73,000 IP cameras whose owners haven’t changed their default passwords. Is this about highlighting an important security problem, or profiting off creepy voyeurism—or both?

Insecam claims to feature feeds from IP cameras all over the world, including 11,000 in the U.S. alone. A quick browse will pull up parking lots and stores but also living rooms and bedrooms. “This site has been designed in order to show the importance of the security settings,” the site’s about page says. But it’s also clearly running and profiting off ads. “

“ After resigning as the press secretary for President Obama on June 20, Carney gave insight into the Obama administration’s handling of classified documents, and responded to criticism that this administration has been the most Orwellian in recent history.

“ I know — because I covered them — that this was said of Clinton and Bush, and it will probably be said of the next White House,” said Carney in a recent New York Times Magazine interview. “I think a little perspective is useful…It is a serious, serious matter to leak classified information. Some of the debate around this kind of forgets how serious that is.”

Even in retiring Carney can’t help but pull out the old “Bush did it” card …

” But, it could also be the changing nature of the relationship between the media and the White House. At a recent event at the New America Foundation, journalists and historians challenged Carney, arguing that this White House has been more secret than previous occupants.

“Increasingly, the Obama White House has become so brittle, and so controlling of the message, that people are afraid to respond to me,” said Kimberly Dozier, a former Associated Press reporter. She was one of the journalists whose phone records were obtained by the Department of Justice last spring during its investigation into a leak of classified information about a failed Al-Qaeda plot. The scope of that investigation, some critics said, was unprecedented overreach.

According to ProPublica, the Obama administration has filed eight cases under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes disclosing information harmful to national security. Before the Obama administration, only three known cases had ever been charged under the act.”

In the end Time reverts to it’s roots and blames bloggers in justifying the administration crack-down on journalistic freedom , comparing bloggers to “pamphleteers” and calling for them to uphold “the same standards as 20th century journalists” … LOL , not exactly setting a very high bar now are they ? … Read the rest at Time

” When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post.

Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. While the federal agency tried to protect their privacy by masking more than 65,000 such references to individuals, the newspaper said it found nearly 900 additional email addresses that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or residents.”

The Snowden revelations continue to reveal the extent of State spying during the Age Of Obama …

” The material reviewed by the Post included roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. It spanned President Barack Obama’s first term, 2009 to 2012, and was provided to the Post by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.

The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted were catalogued and recorded, the Post reported. The newspaper described that material as telling “stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.” The material collected included more than 5,000 private photos, the paper said.”

” The curled metal fixtures set to go up on a handful of Michigan Avenue light poles later this summer may look like delicate pieces of sculpture, but researchers say they’ll provide a big step forward in the way Chicago understands itself by observing the city’s people and surroundings.

The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are decorative, but their job is to protect and conceal a system of data-collection sensors that will measure air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation and wind. The sensors will also count people by measuring wireless signals on mobile devices.”

” Some experts caution that efforts like the one launching here to collect data from people and their surroundings pose concerns of a Big Brother intrusion into personal privacy.

In particular, sensors collecting cellphone data make privacy proponents nervous. But computer scientist Charlie Catlett said the planners have taken precautions to design their sensors to observe mobile devices and count contact with the signal rather than record the digital address of each device.”

” The House of Representatives is moving ahead to curtail how the National Security Agency collects and retains telephone data on Americans, the National Journal reported.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 Wednesday to amend the USA Freedom Act, the National Journal said. The House Intelligence Committee will vote on its version of the legislation on Thursday. The intelligence committee version doesn’t include a blanket prohibition on bulk collection.

House members will need to reconcile conflicts between the two versions. The final bill is expected to be in line with President Barack Obama’s announced NSA reforms. A vote by the full House could take place by the end of May, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Amending the USA Freedom Act is aimed at minimizing how much private information the government retains and to proscribe how such data can be obtained, the Journal reported.”

While we applaud any efforts at reining in government spying , we remain exceedingly skeptical that much will be accomplished in reestablishing our citizenry’s privacy as long as we have the Patriot Act and the FISA courts which really amount to a “Star Chamber” . Read more at Newsmax

” A marketing stunt for the upcoming Ubisoft game “Watch Dogs” is inadvertently allowing users to check how well they’ve set up their Facebook privacy settings.

The campaign called “Digital Shadow“, which currently is available only in the US, requests permission to access a user’s account and then pulls information to build a comprehensive dossier of the user as if he or she were an assassin’s target. And we do mean comprehensive.

Digital Shadow first shows users the photos they’ve tagged as public, then it moves on to examine their friends. It shows users which of their Facebook friends they interact with most, which interact with them the most, which they don’t interact with at all, and (gulp) which friends they’ve been stalking that haven’t been stalking them back. (Those who’ve been keeping tabs on their exes should avoid this section at all costs.) “

We’ve tried and tried without success to access the “Digital Shadow” website in order to report first-hand on how it works but the site is either down for service or , more likely , swamped with traffic from the above referenced article .

Pelosi defended President Obama’s position on the NSA’s surveillance programs, and suggested that leaker Edward Snowden broke the law by whistleblowing. The congresswoman’s defense of spying was not well received.

“ People on the far right are saying ‘Oh, this is the fourth term of President Bush,’” Pelosi said. “Absolutely, positively not so.”

Pelosi then advocated for a greater cooperation between security and privacy agencies.

But the audience did not care for her rhetoric. Several audience members were removed from the room after objecting to Pelosi’s speech.”

” A new Reason-Rupe poll to be launched Thursday morning indicates that 35% of Americans trust the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with their personal data, while only 10% trust Google and only 5% trust Facebook. In fact, while trust in the IRS is low, the tax collection agency remains the most trusted in America, even after a scandal in which the IRS targeted conservative nonprofit groups and leaked confidential tax information.”

You have to admit that if the IRS and NSA are more trusted than you , you’ve done something wrong . Breitbart has the story

” The National Security Agency (NSA) has built and is apparently currently operating a program that allows them to capture and review every single phone call made inside a foreign country, according to a new report fromThe Washington Post based on documents supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Basically, the NSA is DVRing an entire country’s worth of phone conversations. From the Post story:

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.”

” In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

Right now, the program is operational in at least one country. Yet although it was built with collection from only one foreign nation in mind, the agency has contemplated using it on other nations as well. It’s possible, in fact, that the program has expanded beyond its initial target already: “

In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday night, the California Democrat said a drone spied into the window of her home during a protest outside her house, and that privacy concerns for the technology were “major.”

“ I’m in my home and there’s a demonstration out front, and I go to peek out the window and there’s a drone facing me,” she recalled.

Demonstrators from Code Pink who were protesting government surveillance at the time, said the device was merely a toy helicopter, but Feinstein used the instance to sound off about the importance of controlling the technology through government regulation.”

We can be sure that the authoritarian proclivities of Madam Feinstein preclude any hindrance of State operated drones and confine themselves to the use of the technology by private citizens only . Continue reading

In a case very similar to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against warrantless surveillance made “legal” by the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, which the Supreme Court declined to grant “standing” in February 2013, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced the Court had rejected their lawsuit against Bush-era warrantless surveillance.

“ The Supreme Court’s refusal to review this case guarantees that the federal courts will never address a fundamental question: Was the warrantless surveillance program the NSA carried out on President Bush’s orders legal? The Court’s decision also guarantees that the Obama administration, which has for the last five years refused to take any position on that question, will now never have to answer either,” CCR declared.

This refusal will give those who claim the programs are “legal” another notch on the rhetoric belt, as if not discussing the legality (or illegality) of the program was the equivalent to being found legal by the highest court in the land. If the courts are unwilling to entertain surveillance-related cases, either by refusal to grant standing or refusal to hear the case at all, the defenders can continue to claim the programs are legal. “

Read the whole thing at TechDirt . It’s been a very sorry week for individual rights and the Constitution thanks to the “nine old swine” . Madison and Jay would be appalled .

Snowden cannot possibly do the job, because he is in hiding or on the run. Perhaps, from a top secret location, he could be “Skyped” in virtually to chair the university court, one of the functions of he is supposed to fulfill at the University of Glasgow. The moment I suggested that there I regretted it. That’s what they’re going to do, isn’t it? The designer protest Rector of the tech generation, who is at war with the US government over internet spying, can be beamed in remotely, thus “sticking it to the man”.

In truth, much of the outraged reaction from traditionalists over Snowden’s election is hugely overdone. The whistleblower Snowden is merely the latest in a long and quixotic line of choices. All the greats have been Glasgow Rector. Winnie Mandela did the gig, although it was never clear whether she actually knew she had been elected. Questions were asked about the validity of her nomination papers and the authenticity of her signature. Her supporters in the Labour Club always insisted she had signed up.”